


Life after Disco

by god_is_undead



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: I Don't Even Know, I should be doing other things and not posting things I wrote six months ago, Im warning you, Metaphysics, Old Age, Whatever I do what I want, christianity and history musings, life after death, real world to fictional world, really weird shit, this shit gets bizarre, unlikely shit, well maybe they shouldn't have held an episode in a cathedral ok then
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2018-10-20 02:49:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10653372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_is_undead/pseuds/god_is_undead
Summary: In 2084, a woman opens her eyes to find herself in the body of Faye Valentine in the opera house, in a show she has loved since she was a teenager in the early 2000's. Well, it's a hell of a dying hallucination, at any rate, much better than reliving her long, too long life. These are scenes from it.(Odd metaphysics, even odder ruminations on the nature of life, death, one's past, the past, and of the passage of time.)And Vicious is, well, Vicious.(It's weird. I make no apologies, but I'm starting to accept I'm incapable of writing normal fanfiction.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had this written like...ages ago, I only just decided to post it. I may get around to finishing the episodic arc, I may not. The OC is someone who has led what most people around her in the 'real world' would consider to have been a long, successful life; she has other thoughts on the subject.

Finding herself overlooking a dim concert hall from what was apparently a booth, Elena looked to the right.

 Her heart pounded in her chest with a strength and solidity it hadn't had in years, but though she felt some fear it was dulled by morbid fascination. If this was a dying hallucination, a pitiful consolation prize for her undignified collapse in the shower (what a way to go, in the end), it was a _hell_ of a sendoff for her brain to concoct. Even VR hadn't nailed it like this yet.

 Fucking sweet.

  _Fucking hell_.

 And suddenly, almost sixty years of knowing this scene better than any briefing she ever endured came back to chomp on her ass. (Well, she had just had a heart attack in the shower and found herself here. She was in a mood to accept strange things.)

 Mao Yenrai sat there gaping sightlessly across the concert hall, his ashen white face in stark contrast to the red ruin just below that had stained himself and his suit.

 The bag-like sag in his body would have been a dead giveaway if not for his slashed throat, and he looked oddly shrunken as his chin slumped against his chest, mouth slightly open. He smelled faintly; Elena ignored it. He didn't smell like rot; she knew what it was. It was not her first dead body, and this one wasn't even real. _Thanks brain, you could have left that bit out_.

 Still, she couldn't find it in her to be strictly repulsed. It wouldn’t be fair. _That's going to be me, soon_. She might have laughed but for her audience.

 “You're surprised.”

 Caught off guard, absurdly, Elena whipped her head back around as the opera crescendoed, her heart lurching despite the fact she knew both that _this wasn't real_ and that she must have been dying, therefore there wasn't actually anything to be scared of. It felt real enough to get at her, and she was afraid.

 But.

  _But_.

 That was _not_ how that line was supposed to go. Vicious stood just behind the privacy curtain where he was hidden from the door, gazing down at the singer.

 “I…” Elena struggled to speak. Should she try to follow the script? Honestly, that was a scheme of limited possibility; outside of a few scenes in certain episodes—this among them—she did not have the script memorized, and she was a poor actress.

 But before she could come to a conscious decision, she blurted out, “Why did you bring him here? Mao, I mean?”  

 Vicious went unnaturally still as if she had caught him off guard. Then he turned his head and looked down at her. Which, to her knowledge...Faye had only asked who he was, then he answered, and the scene changed. He never looked at her.

 _He's tall_ , she thought, stupidly.

 “You are bait.”

 “That doesn't make any sense,” she blurted out quietly between clenched teeth, before she could stop herself. “Bait? How would you have any idea that anyone would show up here tonight you could use for bait? Don't sidestep my question!” _Oh, shit, SHUT UP! You fucking idiot, get ahold of yourself!_

 Vicious only studied her as if curious, maybe surprised, even amused; he finally tore his eyes away and looked up at the blond man. “Take her to the car now, before intermission.”

 “Yes, sir.”

 _I do like this song, you know. I would have shut up to listen_.

 Elena let herself be hauled to her feet and escorted away, leaving the scene and the opera and the dead man behind. Once in the hallway outside the man holding her wrenched her along. No words were spoken, not that Elena wanted to chat.

 Instead she used the time to think over what was going to happen, as bewildered as she was. They were going to make her call the Bebop and speak to Spike and Jet, Spike would agree to come for his own reasons, and the shit would hit the fan at the cathedral, but Faye was scheduled to survive the encounter.

 Well, that was encouraging.

 The car was an ominous black sedan, wedged neatly between a zippy yellow craft and the wall. _Do gangsters get some kind of discount? Buy our vaguely threatening black land-yachts with tinted windows—two for one?_ The man pushed her head down and crowded her inside.

 “So...what: does Vicious have his own car, or…”

 “Shut up,” the man snapped emotively, angling a bitter leer in her direction.

 “Okay. _Jesus_.” She rolled her eyes a little. The fucker was being really dramatic about everything. “I do respond to please and thank you. Did you know what Marie Antoinette said to her executioner when she stepped on his foot? _Excuse me_.”

 They sat for a few minutes, time Elena took to reflect that the calm before the storm was a drag she had never learned to bear in dignity. In a lot of ways it was worse than the outcome.

 “You're not scared?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence in the cab with an incredulous lilt. It surprised her; the plan thus far literally seemed to be to sit around and twiddle, but what the fuck was he asking about whether she was scared for? _Idiot_.

 “I am.” The unpleasant echo of crises gone by came to her, now nothing but words in history books in which she played bit parts, fragments in her mind and phantom pain. Faded, dying shrieks lanced through her ears; she felt the reflexive internal cringe, repressed the urge to fidget. “You're not the first to complain that I suck at it, though.” _And really, after a while, one learns how to strap on that stiff upper lip_.

 She shut her mouth and continued to gaze out the window at the otherwise still parking garage. The lights were distant and the sky starless; overhead was the overcast, murky black-yellow of light-pollution.

 Not very much longer, Vicious appeared, flanked by two men and no Mao. She watched them, burning with curiosity. What had they done with the body? The opera must not have been over yet as none of the other operagoers had appeared.

 They all piled into the sedan; Elena found herself listening to Chinese she very vaguely recognized as something other than Beijing Mandarin (and they said marathoning foreign romantic dramas didn't do you any good!), but tried to pick meaning out of it anyway. When that proved useless she started to watch the men themselves.

 Did anyone speak Chinese in the show, she wondered. No, or at least it was never stated, but it stood to reason that they would. The Red Dragons were a Chinese-style mafia, Faye was probably Singaporean. Mars was patterned off of Hong Kong. Chinese had probably been _underrepresented_ in the show, which, as good as it was, had cast all-American voices. _Typical_.

 The man who had first accosted her seemed jovial enough; he and the second unknown man—the first was driving—were engaged in a cheerful if vaguely aggressive round of sarcasm.

 Vicious sat in silence by the window, gazing out at the road as it passed and ignoring the ongoing conversation. Elena studied his profile to pass the time; he was—and Elena wasn't terribly shy about admitting these things anymore, age dulled such inhibitions—weirdly alluring in a heady, dangerous sort of way.

Admitting a man was attractive was not the same thing as actually sleeping with him. It was fine to read the menu, after all, but to order? Hell, no.

 He jerked his head around and looked right back at her, eyes faintly narrowed and mouth worked down at the edges. Elena knew a _fuck off and stop staring cunt_ look when she saw one, and she turned her own face away.

 Despite her brazenness, she really was nervous. Part of her staring was just that—fear. Keep the scary bastard in sight.

 It was a long car ride.

 This entire situation sucked, but nothing had ever dulled awe in her faster than boredom. And so far, this was painfully underwhelming. _Isn't it always, though? Like getting shot at. It's not that bad plink plink plink OH FUCK DODGE._

_Fuck this._

 “Can I ask you something?” Elena said, loudly enough and pointedly enough that everyone in the car shut up and stared at her as she looked back at Vicious. Vicious turned his head back from the road, albeit a bit more slowly. Silence. All eyes went tensely to Vicious, who said nothing. “Mao was... _I heard_ Mao was in the middle of peace negotiations,” she said. “What if he's right and the syndicates are on their way to decline? What do you do then?”

 His pale, deadish blue eyes never left her face, but she felt her skin crawl with very real terror as the temperature in the cabin nosedived. She remained motionless, clinging to every ounce of cast iron professionalism she ever had. “They're not.”

 Her voice was damn bitter, and she knew it. “Nobody ever thinks they're on their way out, it hurts too much.” _I should know_. It was always an ugly slap in the face. Bloody, bitter, violent, and in some cases so utterly destructive that it shatters the foundations of reality…

 Sometimes you wake up one day and find a gun in your face, sometimes you wake up one day and find yourself obsolete. Both were equally unpleasant, but obsolescence plucked at a deeper level, and called into question or even unmaking the core of one’s very being. If Elena had to pick the way she went out, she would have taken a soldier's death.

 “What's your point?”

 “I don't have one,” she replied candidly. “Curiosity, I guess? It's a hypothetical question.”

 He continued to look at her for several seconds longer. Then, he looked away.

  _Jesus, you fucking prick_.

 Her question was, of course, a self-defeating one.

 In a sense, Elena already knew the answer because she knew how poorly he dealt with his past.

 He would not be one of the stunned survivors of total collapse, staggering forward for lack of the possibility of going backwards. He would die with his world, be killed or need to be put down to allow time to have its inexorable way.

 He could not countenance it. He could not comprehend it. And he could not live with it.

 And for that, against all instinct and good sense ( _the weight of her own weakness_ ), she held a measure of respect for the man.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paradise Lost, Christianity, history, the Roman Empire, and just your average Tuesday.
> 
> What the hell else is she supposed to think about while waiting for things to happen? She's in a wrecked cathedral, for Christ's sake.
> 
> (When I said this shit was going to get weird, I was serious. :3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, this past year has been terrible. Sorry about how late this is. I am still working on all my other things, too, so hopefully I will update sooner rather than later. I'm looking forward to moving soon enough, and I always do better when on new ground.
> 
> Check the shit out of the end notes for some commentary that may or may not be useful to understand what the fuck just happened. If you’re sitting here like “what the fuckitty fuck did I just read” well… 
> 
> But read these first:
> 
> You might notice I refuse to use BCE/CE, and instead stick to BC/AD. I’ve heard the arguments, and I’m not impressed. I’m not a professional historian so no, I’m under no professional obligation through being threatened with not getting published to follow ‘convention.’ It’s still a religious calendar. Important side tip: I am not Christian, I have no reason to actively promote Christianity, nor am I trying to bitch about it. Christianity is what it is. A religion. It has good points and bad points.
> 
> But as far as the calendar, changing what you call how you signify years before and after Christ supposedly being born isn’t going to change that it’s a religious calendar. To say otherwise is disingenuous and allows people to avoid thinking and that invariably annoys me. I don’t hate the calendar, I don’t even say I want it changed because to do so would really cause mass confusion as most people are just so used to it—but don’t be coy about what it is. There’s no need to change the damn names.
> 
> “Common Era” is way more fucking skeevy anyway. What the fuck is “common” about it except in a particularized cultural milieu? (What about options—what about the Muslim calendar? What about any of the multivariate calendars all over the world? Hell, the Japanese regnal calendar? I’d rather just deal with it for what it is. So, AD/BC. Either that or change the damn calendar wholesale to a historically aseptic series. But how the fuck would you even do that.)
> 
> A calendar based on Christ’s alleged birth is far from the only calendar used around the world, and to call it a “Common” Era is just plain annoying. Until my dying day, I will insist that BCE/CE are creepy. Or we can go back to the Roman calendar, off of which the Julian calendar is based. Under that calendar it’s more like 2,700 AUC, but then that presumes a lot about whether the Roman experience is “common.” Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, all of Asia except for like…Turkey-ish out east to Armenia, that other half of northern Europe northeast of and pretty much including Germany, and both Americas would like a word. Lol. If we roll with the Chinese calendar, it’s more like 4715. Or hey, we could just use the Jewish calendar, that one’s the oldest one we have that’s still in use. Or we can just use that 10K year old calendar they found in Scotland, it’s the oldest one anyone’s found.
> 
> But I’m not using goddamn BCE/CE.
> 
> Or you can tell me that because of the Age of Imperialism it’s common, and then I’m going to have to side-eye you. Really fucking hard.
> 
> On a similar note, Pluto is…a small planet. A dwarf planet. Guys, I’m vaguely irked it fucks up my Sailor Moon roster too, but until a hundred years ago, Ceres was also a straight up planet. What defines a planet has changed more than once, but the previous seismic shift is just barely within living memory and in 1918 most people didn’t give a damn about scientific vagaries on the topic. The point is…
> 
> I need a really long nap.

Historians often give the year 476 AD when asked for the fall of the Roman Empire, the singularity that had ruled much of Europe, North Africa, and parts of the Middle East for around a millennium.

That, so they tell their dear readers, is that. _Was_ that.

Not because the historian is ( _usually_ , unless the reader has found some juicy polemic) trying to lead their reader on; he or she (or whatever) is fully aware that they’re being deliberately reductive because _they can’t help it_ , given the nature of their task—but their reader may not be. Their reader may be someone who sees, hears, and doesn’t turn the statement over and examine it. They take the demarcation on faith.

That demarcation is little more a retrospective break. Rome’s fall was a result of a long period of overall decline in the West—historians often simply draw the line where they do because that was the year (not the day, or the hour) Odoader sacked the city.

The day it fell was probably an average Tuesday for everybody else on the face of the planet (which included the majority of the planet who didn’t have anything to do with Rome or the Roman Empire, or the 99.999%  of the world’s population with no political stake in anything more world-shattering than where the next literal shit hole was to be dug). The event might have hit hard once those far away learned about it, to whom it mattered—Rome, the Eternal City, torn asunder (the capital of the Western Roman Empire, though the Empire that the Romans created would never fully fall until the sack of Constantinople centuries later), but—

Not to say, of course, that it didn’t have longer-term consequences (because it obviously did)—but the consequences of those events could only be understood in retrospect.

Rome was _too big to fail_ , until it did, and only afterwards did anyone see what that really meant.

 The point is, history has the luxury of simplification through time compression; hours, then days, then months, then years, then centuries are reduced to a paragraph. _Patterns_ are made obvious and _meaning_ is attributed, in all its myriad interpretations (some more true to reality than others; not everything is equally fair or valid). Time, nothing but ephemerality, is divided, categorized, packaged, and delivered.

To _create_ history, it’s necessary to pin down what one wants to say _about_ it.

If that sounds something like tautological idiocy or something completely stupid in the first place, then ask _why_ what matters, matters. Who gives a shit about what and why? It's can be just semi-arbitrary determination made after the fact, some instances more obvious than others, some more thematic than others. Some divisions easier to determine than others. It’s also the source of a great deal of conflict, when one group thinks more or less of an event than another.

 Whatever day of 476 AD it was that Odoader rolled up into Rome was just your average fucking Tuesday for the vast majority of people on Earth at the same time.

And people have such short memories. _Don’t worry though: they’ll remind you, or invent whatever they think they must have thought_.

And there Elena was, at the end of all things.

And at the beginning. She was dead, or dying—but _he_ —

 Vicious’ silhouette appeared bleak and dark, slightly hazy in the pale light filtering in through the stained glass.

Lucifer, light-bringer, beloved of God but fallen from grace, surrounded by light, rejecting it and rejected by it. He was in profile, still, silent, patient, resolved, and awaiting his time to strike, his sword cradled against his shoulder. Elena imagined it was self-conscious; _he’s_ the one that brought up fallen angels and devils and all that. Would bring up. Will bring up?

_Well; he’ll have it, soon enough_.

Paradise was lost.

But _when_ had it been lost, though? The day Vicious first met Julia—was _that_ the end, no, or maybe the beginning of the end—or was that the day Spike first met Julia, or the day Spike and Julia began an affair? Or the day Spike and Julia conspired to flee the Syndicate? Or the day Spike faked his death and Julia vanished? All of this could no doubt be reduced to characterize what Vicious might say was simply _betrayal_ , that they have to pay the piper _._

Were Spike and Julia right to have an affair (why? Was Vicious that much of an asshole? Did that alone make it right?), were they right to leave the Syndicate (what about rules, or did those not count? What if _you’re_ held to them but _they’re_ not), break vows and bonds—

At any point, has Vicious looked over his shoulder and thought— _how did I get here?_ What led up to it? Or was it today, when all of those events culminated in this would-be reckoning and became _real_ again for a sparse few moments?

Simplification. Compression. Meaning. Direction. _Purpose_.

Elena wasn’t sure there was a right answer, to any of it, even with as little faith in her own conviction as she had. Perhaps there existed better answers than others, but maybe not a _right_ one, and saying something was _right_ tended to shine more light on the speaker than anything else. Truth could be more of a concept than a fixture, with nothing but better arguments to support it. There were three involved; all three no doubt had their ideas on truth.

_I always missed the point of Paradise Lost, I think._

God always struck Elena as a sanctimonious asshole and had never been impressive, a creature who, for no really good reason aside from ‘ _it_ **_IS_** ’ in the manner of an abusive boyfriend, selfishly demanded blind obedience, arbitrarily setting rules, and called it love.

From what she had seen, that blind, faithful obedience was the very point, adoration from an army of Patty Hearsts following rules which, assuming they remained constant in any sense, God certainly never felt bound by himself. Hell, this deaf-mute surrender was a _positive_ concept in their mind; otherwise why else would Christians themselves make the comparison between lambs and shepherds? The lamb trusted the shepherd to guide it safely. God’s omnipotence _itself_ dismissed all possible claims of hypocrisy.

The lamb went dumbly to its own slaughter, trusting.

Some people really liked, really _needed_ that kind of faith. Some people saw it as a good thing.

Should she say God was right to put humans above angels simply because _she_ was human or did she have to buy into the nice-sounding rhetoric about loving each other first before they started in on the really weird shit? Elena didn’t trust that impulse. _Doesn’t that just…feed my ego? Tell me I’m special?_

Well, wasn’t that a theme. What did Vicious feel about Mao in the wake of Spike’s betrayal? What did Vicious feel about Mao at all? If loyalty was something so important in their lives, if the Syndicate was blood in, blood out, and if Mao made an exception for Spike while preaching…

_What? Where am I going with this?_

Elena thought a moment about that. She’d been married, twice; once to a man and once to a woman, and had a smattering of relationships on both ends and in between. Both marriages went down in flames. She had a hate-hate relationship with her one living relative and his family, her brother’s offspring, a nephew who five years ago tried to have her declared mentally incompetent so he could shunt her into a nursing home and live off her pension.

_Maybe I just can’t get love. I never trusted reality enough to let myself fall for it_.

Was Spike a devil—or a human, set above all other creation? Or was the human Julia, perfect creation, and Spike an angel, the unthinking, imperfect servant of God? Was it the reverse?

Elena glared, quite without meaning to.

Perhaps the cult of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, be it an offshoot of Mithras or whatever, never should have become as widespread as it did, never more than being decent to one another on the individual level—but nothing else could compare to what it became, in that time and place. It became a major export religion in a way that only Buddhism did in the East, and thereby a power unto itself. It made religion _personal_.

And when you have more than two people together with an idea, politics always become involved. Power enters stage right. Protestants like to blame Catholics for being political, but they’re at least as bad, because they grew partly out of a reaction, and in any case the next several centuries were defined by sectarian wars. If relative brute strength won the day for the Romans, religion was the perfect maypole pulling on an individual’s sentiments for a time before nationalism, before the definition of a nation-state as known in the modern day, now the retrenchment of choice for those whom the State failed.

Boiled down: Christianity redefined the relationship between religion, the state, and the populace in its public-private realms.

Throw a third person into the mix and watch Paradise _burn_.

And Vicious sat there, waiting. Mao was dead, Vicious was alive…

_Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven_. The weather sucked, but at least one wouldn’t have to put up with benign smiling hypocrisy.

What kind of life was life when the only reward was in death? One spent in quiet retirement and obedience, whose sole reward is to eat, sleep, and shit one more day. _No wonder a not-insignificant number of the earliest sects of Christianity were suicide cults, like the Agonistici—_

They had taken Faye’s coat which left her freezing cold, and alone with her thoughts, which was usually dangerous. If they didn’t want her thinking about Christianity, they shouldn’t have dragged her to a shattered fucking cathedral, should they have? No.

Elena yawned.

Boredom got old fast and quickly rancidified into reckless irritation, and cold made it worse—and, apparently, made her more abstractly contemplative and sullen than usual, too.

 She wondered what she should be doing instead in this time that had been compressed by a handy dandy scene cut when she remembered that Faye was one tough cookie. She did recover quite well enough to tell somebody to _“Watch it!”_ after all, so at least she didn’t have to pretend to be hysterical. Lord knows she had been tired of near-misses for years now.

 Cowering was not Faye Valentine's style, and Elena saw no reason to pretend it was hers. _If I die, I die; I’m just waiting to wake up from this dream_.

_For a dying hallucination we’ve jumped the fucking shark_.

Elena shifted. Her legs were restless.

 “Can I get one of those?” she asked, peering up at the man who had dragged her from the opera, who was smoking.

 His voice was quiet. “Finally got tired of eye-fucking the boss?”

_Is that supposed to embarrass me?_ She smiled crookedly. _It's not affectation, I just don't care_. “Jealous I’m not staring at you?”

 “Don't even think about it. He’s…”

 The man’s face sobered in a way that spoke of pain and longsuffering concern, of hauntedness and caution. It was the look of a man who had survived savage trauma, although god only knew how he could have been affected.

“Not someone you should go near.”

 And his concern was for her. _Jesus Christ, I don't need that on my chest right now._

 Elena stared at this man in solemn, baffled shock. _He gives a rat’s ass about whether I burn myself? This figment of my dying mind cares? Who are you?_

 Without context it might have set her off, but…

 With context, she backed down. _There's no reason to be hostile, Vicious is in fact a piece of work, and you know that_.

 He saw her relax and offered a grim smile and a cigarette and helped her light it; her hands were still bound.

 “You don't want to know,” he remarked eventually.

 Elena shrugged. And told him the truth.

 “I see a future I didn't choose.”

 His arms came half unhinged. “ _What?_ ”

 “I chose to live,” she explained. _I watched the curtain fall on time and consoled myself with my survival, telling myself that meager existence was an accomplishment itself_. Some days, she was more macabre, but on others she was able to look back and see her own state of mind for what it had been back then: a product of a thousand little nudges, and maybe not a very good state of mind, either.

It didn’t have to be something as big as an Empire, after all: the same rules applied. There just must have been some incremental shift spread over a series of decisions and rationalizations that one eventually looks back on and— _oh fuck, how did we get here?_ It happened on a micro level every day; how did I end up in this abusive relationship? How did I end up broke and homeless? How did I end up in this great relationship? When the fuck did living long enough to become the villain become a thing outside of television—

Sometimes it was a positive entropy—but entropy, always.

She sometimes wondered how the newest revolution in thought would be overturned—which it would, eventually and inevitably, just as the one that gave rise to her world had overturned the one before it—no matter how sure someone was that they were definitely at _the end of history_ THIS TIME, GUYS. (The _End_ of _History_ , ha).

Paradise, and death, and rebirth.

Elena remembered Y2K just a hair before she turned 13, and the absolute sureness with which some people really thought the world would end. Millenarians thought the world would end in 1000 AD, too. What did Vicious think, now, today—was he simply moving things along? Was he bringing the world down on his head? Burning it down with him? Just… _what?_

Honestly, all this thinking was tiresome for her, and the topic was becoming obnoxious. She just wanted to go to fucking sleep and not wake up already, but she just kept _thinking_. Her mind had always been a perpetual motion engine. Death sounded so peaceful.

“He won’t. It…interests me. I’m almost jealous. He won’t get tired.”

 He gaped at her. “Whatever, lady. Just know he’s dangerous.”

  _Blood over the wall, tiny figures blurred the compact mirror, one kneeling. The scald of superheated steel across my back, leaving a scar that followed me to my grave as the body falls in the sand_ …

_They aren't coming_.

Elena stirred, distressed as she pulled herself back into the moment. Wait—where and when and _who?_ For just a moment, she was somewhere else, and it was hot as Hell, not cold as its deepest level.

_He_ is _coming_.

_Spike_ had done exactly as shown on TV—

_Focus_.

“I’m not talking about Vicious,” Elena said at last, raising a delicately slender shoulder, glad that her voice held steady. “I’m talking about me. I chose to live.”

“I don’t get it,” he admitted.

She smiled and shook her head. “I’m interested in him because he makes different choices than I did.”

“What choices did you make,” he asked, a wary note of caution in his voice, as if he was suddenly unsure if she were sane.

“I chose to bury my heart for a tongue.” It was a little more complicated than that, especially at the time—and she had a serious case of ellipsism when she was thinking more clearly, but—

“On second thought, maybe you two would get on a little too well,” he muttered. “Just promise me you won’t start going on about beasts and fangs, okay?”

“Can I stretch my legs,” Elena asked, holding the cigarette rather awkwardly at the side of her mouth as she spoke. “Just to walk around a bit.”

He shook his head.

“You are something else, Miss Valentine. Stay where I can see you. If you don’t, we will shoot.”

The use of the name which wasn’t hers brought her back to awareness.

Elena got to her feet quite easily, in one smooth sweep despite his initial attempt to help her rise; she hadn’t been able to do that in years, but the action comes naturally nonetheless. Her hip gave her no trouble. She couldn’t help but beam.

Her guard stared a moment, bemused and a bit wary. “You aren’t what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“A popsicle case with no memory and a veneer of attitude to make up for it,” he replied bluntly.

_Aren’t I, though?_

“A veneer of attitude. You don’t sound much like a gangster.” Although that was, she supposed, a rather rude thing to say about gangsters. Some of them probably spoke very well. Not that she knew many to make much of a comparison.

“I’ll tell my story if you tell me yours,” he replied, a challenging grin on his face.

She stared at him. He was tall and broad-chested with a killer smile; Elena realized that had she been a young woman she would have pursued that aggressively. _You_ are _a young woman, in this body anyway_.

“Tell you what,” she said, “You already have my number, I’m assuming. If the both of us make it out of here alive, call me, and I’ll tell you over a drink. You’ll pay.”

He laughed out loud.

“It’s a date.”

Elena walked forward, tottering on precariously high heels. She hadn’t worn high heels in years, but it was thematically close enough to riding a bike that she managed.

Vicious hadn’t taken any notice of her since leaving the sedan until this point, but when she walked towards him he lifted his head and leveled a slow, chilly stare straight back into her own eyes as she came to a stop in front of him, at a respectful and cautious distance, hands still bound behind her back. She was reduced to silence for several seconds as the hair rose on the back of her neck. Bored while doing nothing she may easily become, but he was still scary as hell, and dangerous.

“My leg was falling asleep. I’m not going anywhere, I promise. Your guy over there already said to stay in sight, and I will.”

A thin white eyebrow rose just a hair, incredulous.

Elena lifted one of her own and let silence have its moment. If he had something to say, she would absolutely listen. Then, with a little shake to loosen her from the weight of his continued muteness and dead-eyed staring, she moved on. If he killed her, then that was something, at least. What had initially been surprising, even gratifying, a last blazing hurrah, had quickly drained of novelty over the last few hours. She was getting tired of this hurry up and wait nonsense. _Let me die, already_.

“Do not try to run,” he barked, sounding for all the world like some kind of eldritch thing, and a surprising non-sequitur that caught her a little off guard and left her in the lurch, wondering what the hell he was thinking. _I thought we already covered this?_

She turned her head and looked back, wide-eyed. Her shoulders were stiff, she was distinctly uncertain. She was aware he could lash out. She held herself in anticipation as his pale blue eyes bored into her own with an eerie, if flat directness—his slightly narrowed eyes never wavered, or dropped to Faye’s all but completely exposed figure—

She swallowed hard when she realized what was going on.

_He’s trying to figure me out_. Or, worse: he wasn’t trying. He called himself a beast; and like a beast, maybe he did have some kind of intrinsic intuition he didn’t allow himself to overthink…

“Of course not, sir.”

Elena wasn’t especially sensitive to these things, but he kept staring at her when she made herself turn her back and stretch her legs.

He didn’t say another word.

* * *

 

*

“What’s wrong? If you don’t comply…”

Spike moves with a single, smooth pull of the trigger and—

The reaction is immediate and reflexive; I snap my face to the side in unhidden horror, and I look up as the man with the blonde hair’s head snaps back and he falls. A spray of warm wetness splashed over my face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weird historical notes: the 30 Year’s War effectively ended the concept of Christendom and created the modern concept of nation-states (although if you read much about this shit, there’s a lot of angst today about the definition of sovereignty and nation-states changing in the 21st century…I digress); Cardinal Richelieu, famously villainous in every Three Musketeers production since its inception (including one badass Tim Curry role), became notorious in part because of and how he contributed to this. 
> 
> One might get the impression that some historians believe history is leading up to something and that’s likely true, of the writer’s own implicit perceptions; Marxist historians are particularly notorious on that point, which is a really funny irony to me, although their emphasis on class struggle as lens to study makes them worth reading—Marx liked to go on, but he seemed to unconsciously reflect that very Christian notion of temporal progress, towards apocalypse, or utopia, the progress of time being such a fundamental ideation that most people take it for granted and have a hard time seeing outside of that paradigm. It isn’t a perspectival constant that everyone across all time and place shared. In and of itself it isn’t really a bad thing—it just IS.
> 
> Apocalypse is one of the most fundamental aspects of Christianity, one which had varying levels of importance at differing times to different people (you still see apocalyptic and suicide cults in Christianity now and again, usually in compounds, and usually they go up in literal flames), but also one which didn’t have to be part of the equation at all; tradition always has to be invented. Why? For people who are living what someone will define as tradition, it’s simply how things are done—or else a retroactively assigned quality. The Victorians invented the cult of true womanhood and fucked women’s rights six ways from Sunday, because every lackwit drooling idiot with a pair of testicles dangling between his legs is given a reason to think he’s superior and maintain that unequal circumstance using specious but self-reassuring arguments. And then some women like it because it suits them, then mistake what suits them as good for everyone else. 
> 
> If the 19th century invented what would pass for social tradition in the 20th and 21st century, then the basic kernel of Christianity as it’s understood was invented in the early 4th century by the Council of Nicaea shortly after Constantine’s conversion, where they rejected all gospels and teachings that didn’t say what they wanted to say and called everyone else heretics.
> 
> Basically I’m a complete fucking pseudo-intellectual asshole with all of zero chill. Sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> Because one day we'll all be old fuckers, but we'll never forget what makes us human, and Cowboy Bebop is my favorite show.


End file.
